One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education

This story appears in the November 19, 2012 issue of Forbes.
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Much like the story of Bill Hewlett and David Packard founding Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto garage during the depths of the Great Depression, a fine dust of hagiography is already settling around Salman Khan's life story and the origins of the Khan Academy.

Khan's Road to Damascus moment came in 2009. By that point he had been creating YouTube videos for three years (they grew out of tutoring sessions with his cousin Nadia when he was living in Boston and she was in New Orleans), and they were garnering tens of thousands of views every day. But despite the time he was putting into the project, Khan viewed it as largely a hobby.

Then Khan received an e-mail from a young man who had, despite some pretty long odds, managed to get accepted into college. But he was still far behind his classmates, particularly in math. Then he discovered Khan's videos. "Spent the entire summer on your YouTube page ... and I just wanted to thank you for everything you are doing," he wrote. "Last week I tested for a math placement exam and am now in Honors Math 200. ... I can say without any doubt that you have changed my life and the lives of everyone in my family."

The words struck Khan deeply, especially since he had grown up poor, raised by a single mom in Metairie, La. at a time when that town's claim to fame was electing a white supremacist, former Klan leader David Duke, to the state legislature. It was only his intellectual gifts--he had competed in regional and national math competitions in high school--that allowed him to escape to Cambridge, Mass. and MIT. Once there Khan distinguished himself both by his rebellious look--he had played in a death-metal band in high school and still sported muscle Ts, wild hair, pierced ears--and the quality of his mind.

"What I did by virtue of skipping a lot of classes was get two undergraduate degrees and a master's in four years," Khan recalls. "It wasn't slacking. There were much more productive ways of learning everything than sitting in lectures."

But by 2009 Sal's rebel days were long behind him. He had a lucrative job as a hedge fund analyst, an infant son and a wife who was still training for her medical career. And despite the finance job, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, the two had far less than $1 million in savings. Making YouTube videos full-time seemed unthinkable. But that e-mail pushed Khan over the edge. He quit his job, installed himself in a walk-in closet off the bedroom and started cranking out videos. His wife said he could do it for a year. Ten months later Khan still had no financing and was almost on the verge of giving up. Then Ann Doerr wrote him his first check.

"I decided I wanted to send a little contribution," Doerr recalls. "What was honestly stunning to me was that Sal had been on a number of news shows--CNN and the like--and I just assumed that he was well set financially. Then I found out I was his biggest contributor. The other thing I found out that he was about ready to call it a day and get a 'real' job, which was to me equally frightening."

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Khan has recently published a book, The One World Schoolhouse (Twelve, 2012), that recounts the story of Khan Academy and outlines a radical vision of the future of education. Khan would like to re-create the once common mixed-age classrooms that he believes encourage older kids to take responsibility for younger ones. He wants multiteacher classrooms to provide students with different perspectives. He would abolish summer vacation--"a monumental waste of time and money." And he would eliminate letter grades altogether, preferring a more qualitative approach to assessment, what he terms a "running multiyear narrative."

It is heady, dreamy stuff and about as likely to happen as, well, a single teacher inspiring millions of students around the world using nothing more than crudely drawn YouTube videos.

"Sal Khan is arguably the most impactful educator in the world, and he has done it in 24 months," says GSV's Moe. "That's really cool and exciting and motivating. He is leading the revolution. My only disappointment is I think he could have done just as well as a for-profit--although it's hard to argue he made the wrong strategic decision."

Khan is nonplussed. "Being a billionaire is sort of passee," he shrugs. "It's ironic. When I used to try and describe what the Khan Academy was, I would tell people that if it were a for-profit I would be on the cover of FORBES."